Transcript
REBECCA WINTHROP: We all know in traditional international development, research says that if you increase a population’s years in school, you’re going to lead to all sorts of better things, such as improved economic outcomes, improved health outcomes, et cetera, and that’s traditionally what people have thought. And, of course, that relies on the assumption that for every year of school you pass through you’re learning something, you’re acquiring some basic skills.
And we now know it’s not rocket science, although there have been a number of very skilled economists who have spent quite bit of time investigating this, but, actually, improving people’s quality of life, improving economic development, improving health outcomes has much less to do with the number of years of school you spend, but actually the skills and knowledge you develop while there. I mean, it’s not a surprising insight. You can imagine if you spend four years in school, five years in school and you learn to -- you acquire basic literacy skills, numeracy skills, critical thinking, problem-solving skills. You are, at the end of the day, eventually going to be a lot more relevant and useful for the labor market if you spend -- versus spending six, seven years in school and not acquiring any of those skills. So, the quality of learning is really important for a whole range of issues to do for personal development as well as international development and improving sort of our global community.
Unfortunately, this focus on both the quality of learning and the quality of education is not something that the global community is heavily emphasizing today. I would really argue that this attention to learning and quality has been lost. I wouldn’t say it’s missing from sort of global policy on education, largely because in 1990 the world’s education ministers as well as many international development partners and international donors got together and came up with six education-for-all goals, and in those goals, education quality was an important part. However, in the last 10 years, two of those of those goals have been taken up by the Millennium Development Goals.
So at the new millennium, the United Nations, along with the global community, picked sort of eight things they thought that the whole world should focus on to really try to improve things for poor countries especially, and two of those goals are focused on education.
But really what they’re focused on is not necessarily quality; they’re focused on ensuring students around the world, both boys and girls, enroll in school and stay in school. And ultimately what’s happened is there’s been a whole range of policies and support and financing around getting kids into school and helping them stay in school, and without the accompanying sort of policies and supports that are needed to ensure that while they’re there, they’re learning something, and so to me this is actually an urgent issue that we all need to sort of begin to focus on.
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